Friendly - Hyde v FC United, Tuesday 24 July 2012

FC United will be playing a friendly against newly promoted Conference club Hyde FC on Tuesday 24 July 2012.
Many FC United fans count Hyde’s Ewen Fields as one of their favourite grounds. We’ve previously played there as the away team when Abbey Hey hired it for a NWCFL game in 2007 and in a friendly against Hyde in 2009, but many will remember we’ve also staged a league home game there against Nantwich in October 2009. This friendly invitation from another higher level club emphasises that FC United are being considered by our friendly opponents as a good footballing test and adds to a very strong pre-season programme for our squad.

Right, so now we’ve dealt with the football side of things, let’s move on to discuss the (blue) elephant in the room...

The invitation from Hyde contained the following statement:
"Please let me reassure you, Hyde FC are not owned in any way by Manchester City, and City will NOT benefit at all from a match with yourselves."
It’s rather sad that they felt obliged to make that reassurance, but Hyde are very realistic about their situation and have already produced this rather amusing information on their forum to answer the many questions opposition fans ask them. We’d like to suggest FC United fans read that link before our friendly and that we all remember Hyde are a local, fellow non-league club who have been very good to FC United since our formation.

We’re looking forward to an exciting friendly, possibly tinged with a bit of a ’derby’ atmosphere, played in the very amicable spirit of past games we’ve had with our other blue-ish neighbours, Maine Road.